Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security: Is It Good or Bad?

Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security: Is It Good or Bad?

AI is the most coveted tool for both criminals and white-hats. Its role is still wavering between the two sides seeking equilibrium.

Thanks to its quick learning capabilities and smart ability to not just automate functions but also devise contextual decisions, AI has become the golden goose for developers and analysts! This may albeit have bigger impacts on security too – perhaps, not surprisingly, companies simply lack the resources to scout through a bundle of unstructured anomalies for the well-acknowledged malicious needle.

Put simply, AI and machine learning focus on understanding behavioral patterns and norms. The system observes the normal behaviors and constructs its own baseline – it takes time to pick up aberrations from the norm and applies algorithmic knowledge to the respective data set.

Nevertheless, cybercriminals are constantly found leveraging AI – it’s one of the most potent downsides of AI, the revolutionary tool. The technology is widely used for numerous nefarious tasks across the globe. Time and again, technologists and researchers warn government organizations and corporations of plausible attacks on their computers and data – in fact, in February, a combined effort from the University of Oxford and Cambridge suggested that AI could be used to hack drones and self-driven vehicles and turn them into deadly weapons.

“Autonomous cars like Google’s (Waymo) are already using deep learning, can already raid obstacles in the real world,” a representative said, “so raiding traditional anti-malware system in cyber domain is possible.”

Another prominent study, conducted by US cybersecurity bigwig Symantec noted that cybercrime in the last year alone affected almost 20 countries with 978 million people. It leads to a total loss of $172 billion – if we calculate the cost per person it would round up to $142 each individual.

No wonder, many fear that AI will usher all of us into a dawn of new types of cybercrimes, more intricate, more potent than their traditional counterparts. “We’re still in the early days of the attackers using artificial intelligence themselves, but that day is going to come,” alerts Nicole Eagan, CEO of Darktrace, another cybersecurity firm. “And I think once that switch is flipped on, there’s going to be no turning back, so we are very concerned about the use of AI by the attackers in many ways because they could try to use AI to blend into the background of these networks.”

Meanwhile, the global industry is adopting AI like never before. Why not?! AI and machine learning are revolutionizing markets and industries across the globe. They offer improved recommendations to online shoppers, speed up manufacturing processes with automatic quality checks, tackle environmental hazards and ensure quick monitoring of the situations.

But of course, we can never ignore the dual-nature of AI, how it can be implemented for a good cause as well as a force of evil! Thus, in such a trying situation, it becomes imperative to build a strong cyber security team brimming with expertise, talent and needful knowledge to tackle cutting-edge cyber crimes. Undeniably, cyber security course in India is the need of the hour.